Remarks at the Congo Basin Forest Partnership Launch

But our forests mean so much more to us than just their beauty. They are home to an incredible diversity of plant and animal species. They play an irreplaceable role in sustaining our environment, whether by absorbing carbon dioxide, by cleansing the water or holding the soil. Our sources of lumber crops and tourism, forests are all so critical to our economies. Clearly, our forests are essential to our well-being. They also need our help for they are at risk, for in the last decade alone tropical forests have disappeared every year at an average rate of 35 million acres, an area the size of Barbados.

This loss is devastating, devastating to the economy of the country concerned, to the ecology, not only of that country, but of developing countries throughout the world. Indeed, this devastation is affecting the well-being of all of us. Deforestation has created deserts and dust bowls. It creates floods, creates pollution. The destruction of our forests threatens our health and threatens our happiness today, and threatens the lives of our children, our grandchildren, yet unborn.

Nowhere is this threat to our forests more pressing than here in Africa, and especially in Central Africa. The Congo Basin contains a quarter of the world’s tropical forest. It is a region of extraordinary biological richness. But the Congo Basin Forest is being degraded at the rate of two million acres every year. We must do something to preserve this global treasure, and that is why on behalf of President Bush, the American people, and our partners, I am so pleased to launch with our partners the Congo Basin Forest Partnership. This initiative is a commitment by the United States, the six governments of the Congo Basin, other partner governments, conservation and business groups, and organizations representing civil society to work with the countries of the Congo Basin, to manage their forests in a sustainable fashion.

We, and our fellow participants in this partnership, have agreed to work together to help the countries of the Congo Basin create and manage protected forest areas, such as national parks. We will work together to combat illegal logging and other unsustainable practices, and we will implement programs to improve forest management and give people a stake in the preservation of the forest, by providing them with sustainable forest based livelihoods.

The Congo Basin Forest Partnership is an important example of the new approach to sustainable development that has emerged recently and that has been re-affirmed at this Johannesburg Summit. Essential to this approach is the realization that sustainable development is too big for any government alone, or any combination of governments.

Sustainable development requires results oriented partnerships among governments, the private sector, the scientific community, conservation groups and the organizations of civil society, all coming together to mobilize the resources we need to meet our ambitious goals.

The road to sustainable development is a long one and a hard one. The Congo Basin Forest Partnership itself is the result of five years of hard work and commitment by devoted groups of individuals, governments and private organizations. They have only started it from different perspectives, all the partners arrived with a common vision for protecting the Congo Basin, and just as important, all realizing that we must work together to be successful.

After I leave Johannesburg, I will travel tomorrow to Gabon to see first hand that country’s commitment to the goals of our new partnership. I only regret that in this trip I cannot visit each and every one of the Congo Basin nations, because this is a journey that we are all taking together. It is a journey that I am confident will be a successful one with the good will that we are showing here today.

Thank you very much.